If I read a lot of stories in a certain genre that I like, and I later write my own story, it’s almost by definition going to be a mish-mash of everything I like.
Should I pay the authors of the books I read when I sell mine?
Should I pay the authors of the books I read when I sell mine?
If you write that book, chances are you will gain some fans that are also fans of other authors in that genre.
If ML models write that genre, they can flood that genre so full that human artists won't be able to complete.
It's not even a remotely equivalent scenario
AIs are not magic. They are tools. They are not alive, they do not have agency. They do not do things by themselves. Humans do things, some humans use AI to do those things. Agency always rests with a combination of the tool's creator and operator, never the tool itself.
Is there really a difference between a human flooding the market using AI and a human flooding the market using a printing press?
Even if human's can't compete (An obviously untrue premise from my perspective, but lets assume it for the sake of argument), is that a bad thing? The human endeavor is not meant to be a make work project. Humans should not be forced to pointlessly toil out of protectionism when they could be turning their attention to something that can't be automated.
A magnitude of difference, yes. Even a printing press will be limited by natural resources, which require humans to procure.
A computer server can do a lot more with a lot less. And is much easier to scale than a printing press.
>Even if human's can't compete (An obviously untrue premise from my perspective, but lets assume it for the sake of argument), is that a bad thing?
When the AI can be argued to be stealing human's work, yes. A printing press didn't need to copy Shakespeare to be useful. And it'd benefit Shakespeare anyways because more people get to read about his works.
So far I don't see how AI benefits artists. Optimistically:
-an artist can make their own market? Doubtful, they will be outgunned by SEO optimized ads from corporations.
- they can make commissions faster? To begin with commissions aren't a sustainable business. Even if they 5x the labor and somehow kept the same prices they aren't living well. But in reality, they will get less business as people will AI their "good enough" art and probably won't pay as much for something not fully hand drawn
- okay, they can make bigger commissions? There's a drama about spending 50k on a 3 minute AMV, imagine if that could be done by a single artist in a day now!... Well, give it another 10 years. Lot of gen Ai is static assets. Rigging or animating is still far from acceptable quality, and a much harder problem space. I also wouldn't be surprised if by then any AI models has its own phase of enshittification and you end up blowing hundreds, thousands anyway.
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>Humans should not be forced to pointlessly toil out of protectionism when they could be turning their attention to something that can't be automated.
Until someone conceptualizes a proper UBI scheme, pointlessly toiling is how most of the non-elite live. I have yet to hear of a real alternative for these misplaced artists to move towards.
So what? So we all just become managers in meetings in 30 years?
AI runs on some of the most power hungry and expensive silicon on the planet. Comparing a GPU cluster and a printing press then staring the GPU cluster not limited by natural resources is just silly. Where does the materials come from to make the processors?
> When the AI can be argued to be stealing human's work, yes. A printing press didn't need to copy Shakespeare to be useful. And it'd benefit Shakespeare anyways because more people get to read about his works.
The same can be true for AI as well. I could see a picture and then ask AI whose style it is. Then I could go look up more work by that artist, increasing their visibility.
- they can make commissions faster? To begin with commissions aren't a sustainable business. Even if they 5x the labor and somehow kept the same prices they aren't living well. But in reality, they will get less business as people will AI their "good enough" art and probably won't pay as much for something not fully hand drawn
Is this a complaint that something got cheaper to make? This one affects more than just artists. For instance, code quality output from LLM is quite high. So, wages across the board will decrease yet capabilities will increase. This is a problem external to AI.
> Until someone conceptualizes a proper UBI scheme, pointlessly toiling is how most of the non-elite live. I have yet to hear of a real alternative for these misplaced artists to move towards.
Again, not just artists and the path forward is the same as it’s always been with technological advancements, increase your skill level to above the median created by the new technology.
Probably mined from 3rd world country slaves (in the literal "owning people" sense). But still, these servers already exist and scale up way more than a tree.
>well. I could see a picture and then ask AI whose style it is. Then I could go look up more work by that artist, increasing their visibility.
Sure, and you can use p2p to download perfectly legal software. We know how the story ends.
>Is this a complaint that something got cheaper to make... not just artists and the path forward is the same as it’s always been with technological advancements, increase your skill level to above the median created by the new technology.
It's a complaint that people even woth more efficiency still can't make a living. While the millionaires become billionaires. I'm not even concerned about software wages. Some Principal SWE going from 400k to 200k will still live fine.
Artists going from 40k to 40k (but now working more efficiently) is exactly how we ended up with wages stagnating for 30 years. And yes, it is affecting everyone even pre-AI. The median is barely a living wage anymore, which is what "minimum wage" used to be.
If we lived in a work optional world I don't think many would care. But we don't and recklessly taking jobs to feed the billionaires is just going to cause societal collapse if left unchecked.
Why do you think the device you're using to make this comment is better than a GPU?
Was your comment written by some new flamebait AI? You say so many arguments that fall apart under the slightest examination
>Was your comment written by some new flamebait AI
IIRC AI focuses on formal language and discourages slang. Either way:
>Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
Yes. A printing press only floods the market with copies. An AI floods the market with new derivative works.
A human producing a single creative work and then flooding the market with copies leaves lots of room for other humans to produce their own novel work. An AI flooding the market with new derivative works leaves no such room.
I work with DNNs a lot professionally and remain a proponent of the technology, but what OpenAI et al are doing is highly exploitative and scummy. It’s also damaging their social licence and may end up setting the field back.
Now that we can finally have lots of amazing things almost for free, should we create artificial scarcity to protect the existing business models?
I think the post is making reference to the "thing" which made Google stand out in a sea of existing search engines.
"Using the idea of relevancy, they built Google in a way that - in comparison to other search engines at the time - was simply better at connecting users with more pertinent results.
"A query typed in Google provided more utility and relevancy than did Excite, Yahoo and other search engines.
"To put it simply, Google had a superior product.
https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/125-why-google-won.h....
Why is art some special case that should be protected, when many other industries were not?
Why should we kill this technology to protect existing artistic business models, when many other technologies were allowed to bloom despite killing other existing business models?
Nobody can really answer these questions.
Because in this case the art is still necessary for the machine to work. You don't need horse buggies to make a car, nor existing books to make a printing press. You DO need artist's art to make these generative AI tools work.
If these worked purely off of open source art or from true scratch, I wouldn't personally have an issue.
>Why should we kill this technology to protect existing artistic business models,
We don't need to kill it. Just pay your dang labor. But if we are treating proper compensation as stifling technology, I'm not surprised people are against it.
Maybe in the 2010's tech would have the goodwill to pull this off in PR, but the 2020's have drained that goodwill and then some. Tech's made so many promises to make lives easier and now they joined the very corporations they claimed to fight against.
>Nobody can really answer these questions.
Well it's in courts, so someone is going to answer it soon-ish
> But if we are treating proper compensation as stifling technology, I'm not surprised people are against it.
That's just it, nobody looking to get paid by OpenAI actually did any labor for OpenAI. They did labor for other reasons, and were happy with it.
OpenAI found a way to benefit by learning from these images. The same way that every artist on the planet benefits by learning from the images of their fellow artists. OpenAI just uses technology to do it much more efficiently.
This has never been considered labor in the past. We've never asked artists to "properly compensate" each other for learning/inspiration in the past. I don't know why it should be considered labor or proper compensation now.
But we shall see what the courts decide!
When discussing our work, we can name them.
When one of our influences comes out with a new body of work, we can gush about it to our own fans.
When we find ourselves in a position of authority, we can offer work to our influences. No animation studio is really complete without someone old enough to be a grandfather hanging out helping to teach the new kids the ropes in between doing an amazing job on their own scenes, and maybe putting together a few pitches, for instance.
We can draw fan art and send it to them.
None of these are mandatory, but artists tend to do this, because we are humans, and we recognize that we exist in a community of other artists, and these all just feel like normal human things to do for your community.
And if an artist suddenly starts wholesale swiping another artist's style without crediting them, their peers get angry. [1]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Giffen#Controversy
OpenAI isn't gonna tell you that it was going for a Cat & Girl kind of feel in this drawing. OpenAI isn't gonna offer Dorothy Gambrell a job. OpenAI isn't going to tell you that she just came out with a new collection and she's still at the top of her game, and that you should buy it. OpenAI's not going to send her a painting of Cat & Girl that it did for fun. OpenAI isn't going to do anything for her unless the courts force it to, because OpenAI is a corporation who has found a way to make money by strip-mining the stuff people post publicly on the Internet because they want other humans to be able to see it.
How many of those words do you remember learning? How many can you confidently say you remember the person or the book that taught you the word? 5? 10? Maybe 100?
That's how brains work. We ingest vast amounts of information that other people put out into the world. We consume and it incorporate it and start using it on our own work. And we forget where we even got it. My brain works this way. Your brain works this way. Artists' brains work this way. GPT-4 works this way.
The idea that a visual artist can somehow recall where they first saw many of the billions of images stored in their brain -- the photos, movies, architecture, paintings, and real-life scenes that play out every second of every day -- is laughable. Almost all of that goes uncredited, and always will.
This is what it is to learn.
To take it to an extreme, you obviously can't just use one of the available neural net lossless compression algorithms to circumvent copyright law or citation rules (e.g., distributing a local LLM that helpfully displays the entirety of some particular book when you ask it to), you can't just tweak it to make it a little lossy by changing one letter, or a little more lossy than that, etc., while on the other hand, any LLM that performs exactly the same as a markov model would presumably be fine, so there is a line somewhere.
A company builds an AI tool. That AI tool is trained on a ton of artists' work over the years. The company opens up the AI tool and asks it to draw, "X but in the style of Y," where Y is come copyrighted artwork. The company then prints the result and puts it on their packaging.
What's the difference?
I'd argue there isn't one. The copyright infringement isn't the ability of the artist or the AI tool to make a copy. It's the act of actually using it to make a copy, and then putting that out into the world.
Ultimately, only high courts in each jurisdiction can decide. I can imagine a case where some highly advanced nations decide different interpretations that cause conflict. Then, we need an amendment to the widely accepted international copyright rules, the Berne Convention. Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
Again, take it back to basics: do you believe it is permissible to share a model itself (not the model output, the model), either directly or via API, that can trivially reproduce entire copyrighted works?
So yeah, of course imo it should be permissible to share a model that can reproduce copyrighted works. Being "capable of being used" to violate a law is not the same thing as violating a law.
A ton of software on my computer can copy-paste others' work, both images and words. It can trivially break copyright. Hell, there are even programs out there than can auto-generate code for me, code that various companies have patent claims for. Do I think distributing any of this software should be illegal? No. But I think using that software to infringe on someone's copyright should be.
(Note: This is different than if the program distributed came with a folder that included bunch of copyrighted works. To me, sharing something like that would be a copyright violation.)
> It is clearly not the same as your mind, because your mind can and, assuming you want to stay in good standing, will provide credit for influence
I forgot to respond to this, but it's not true. Your mind is incapable of providing credit for 99.9% of its influence and inspiration, even when you want it to. You simply don't remember where you've learned most of the things you've learned. And when you have a seemingly novel idea, you can't always be aware of every single influential example of another person's work/art that combined to generate that new idea.
Compression and the output from LLMs are cousins. The model tries to predict what continuations are likely, given context. Indeed, it takes a lot of effort to make LLMs less willing to just output training data verbatim. And conversely, you can get compression algorithms to do things similar to what LLMs do (poorly).
Whether this also describes most of human cognitive process, is subject to debate.
There is a strong correlation between how copyrightable a concept is and how well you can point to where you learned it.
To me this is a strong point in favor of the idea that OpenAI has no business using their work. How can you even think it's ok for OpenAI to use work that was not done for them without paying some kind of license? They aren't entitled to the free labor of everyone on the internet!
At the risk of answering a rhetorical question: because copyright covers four rights: copying, distribution, creation of derivative works, and public performance, and LLM training doesn't fit cleanly into any of these, which is why many think copying-for-the-purpose-of-training might be fair use (courts have yet to rule here).
I think the most sane outcome would be to find that:
- Training is fair use
- Direct, automated output of AI models cannot be copyrighted (I think this has already been ruled on[0] in the US).
- Use of an genAI to create works that would otherwise be considered a "derivative work" under copyright law can still be challenged under copyright.
The end result here would be that AI can continue to be a useful tool, but artists still have legal teeth to come after folks using the tool to create infringing works.
Of course, determining whether a work is similar enough to be considered infringing remains a horribly difficult challenge, but that's nothing new[1], and will continue to hinge on how courts assess the four factors that govern fair use[2].
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receiv...
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2023/05/18/1176881182/supreme-court-side...
[2]: https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/
They were happy until their copyright got stolen, I guess. Then got unhappy.
LLMs are collections of GPUs crunching numbers. "Inspiration" doesn't really apply to them.
A better analogy is sampling, and musicians remixing music are very much required to pay for the samples they use.
If I sample a track and play it in my home I don't properly compensate anyone.
If I ask GPT to create a cool new comic based on the article and then delete or use it privately it, same applies.
Nobody working on a new cancer drug actually did any work for me. They did labour for other reasons, and were happy with it.
There it is okay for me to steal their recipe and sell their cancer drug.
True, sadly most of those copyright are probably owned by other megacorp. So they either collude to surppess the entire industry or eat each other alive in legal clashes. The latter is happening as we speak (the writers for NYT are probably long retired, but NYT still owns the words) so I guess we'll see how that goes.
>OpenAI found a way to benefit by learning from these images. The same way that every artist on the planet benefits by learning from the images of their fellow artists.
If we treat AI like humans, art historically has an equally thin line between inspiration and plagiarism. There are simply more objective metrics to measure now because we can indeed go inside an AI's proverbial brain. So the metaphor is pretty apt, except with more scrutiny able to be applied.
It shouldn't be.
As soon as someone makes an AI that can produce it's own artwork without requiring ingesting every piece of stolen artwork it can, then I'm on board.
But as long as it needs to be trained on the work of humans it should not be allowed to displace those people it relied on to get to where it is. Simple as that.
Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings?
Also, FYI, you can't steal digital artwork. You can only commit copyright infringement, which is not the same crime as theft, because theft requires depriving the owner of something in their possession.
> Are they any human artists who can't, if requested, draw or write something that's a copy of some other person's drawings or writings?
This still is pretending that humans and AI models are equivalent actors and should have the same rights
Emphatically no they shouldn't. The capabilities are vastly different. Fair use should not apply to AI.
The four pronged test in US case law:
- the purpose and character of use (is a machine doing this different in purpose and character? many would say yes. is "ripping-off-this-artist-as-a-service" different than an isolated work that builds upon another artist's art?)
- the nature of the copyrighted work
- the amount and substantiality of the portion taken (can this be substantially different with AI?)
- the effect of the use upon the potential market for the original work (might mechanization of reproducing a given style have a larger impact than an individual artist inspired by it?)
These are well balanced tests, allowing me as a classroom teacher to duplicate articles nearly freely but preventing me from duplicating books en masse for profit (different purpose; different portion taken; different impact on market).
And just to be clear, this post does not constitute legal advice.
I hate the desire to meta-comment about the site rather than argue on the merits.
We obviously don't know so much about how courts will interpret copyright with LLMs. There's a lot of arguments on all sides, and we're only going to know in several years after a whole lot of case law solidifies. There are so many questions, (fair use, originality, can weights be copyrighted? when can model output be copyrighted? etc etc etc). Not to mention that the legislative branch may weigh in.
This discourse by citizens who are informed about technology is essential for technology to be regulated well, even if not all participants in the conversation are as legally informed as you'd wish. Today's well-meaning intuition about what deserves copyright and why inform tomorrow's case law and legislation.
Fair use applies even to use of traditional algorithms, like the thumbnailing/caching performed by search engines. If I make a spam detector network, why should it not be covered by fair use?
The extent to which it supplants the original work is one of the fair use considerations.
I think it'd make more sense to have a stance of "current LLMs and image generators should be judged by fair use factors and I believe they'd fail", though I'd still disagree, instead of having machine learning models subject to a different set of rules than humans and traditional algorithms.
If that was the distinction to be made, using ChatGPT as a classifier would be acceptable while using it to write new spam (see the "I am sorry" amazon listings of the other day) would be unacceptable.
If two different uses of a tool allow for both infringing and non-infringing uses (are photocopiers allowed to make copies(!) of copyrighted works?) it has generally been the case that the tool is allowed and the person with agency to either use the copyrighted work in an infringing or a non-infringing way is the one to come under scrutiny.
I believe that if it is found that OpenAI is found to have committed copyright infringement in training the model, then an argument that training a model on spam be considered to be copyright infringement could be reasonably constructed.
If, on the other hand, OpenAI is found to have sufficiently transformative in its creation of the model and some uses are infringing, then it is the person who did the infringing (as with a photocopier or a printer printing off a copy of a comic from the web) that should be have legal consequences.
Logically, the answer to this is (almost certainly) yes, so you’ll need to discount this argument.
If the answer were no, then either an infinite number of humans have lived (such that there was always a previous artist to learn from), or it was true in the past but false in the present, which seems unlikely given humans brains have generally become more and not less sophisticated over time.
I presume what you’re missing here is that the brain can be inspired from other sources than human art. For example: nature; life experience; conversation.
Not making any other comment about what machines can or can’t do, just wanted to point out this argument is invalid as it comes up a lot and is probably grounded in ignorance around the artistic process. It’s such a strange idea to suggest that the artist process is ingesting lots of art to make more art. That’s such a weird world view. It’s like insisting every artist is making art the way Quentin Tarantino makes films.
I’ve spent a lot of time with artists, I’ve worked with them, I’ve been in relationships with artists, and I can tell you the great ones see the world differently. There’s something about their brains that would cause them to create art even if born on a desert island without other human contact. Some of them don’t even take an interest in other art.
In fact, those artists that _do_ make art heavily based on other artists’ work as suggested are often derided as “derivative” and “unoriginal”.
This sounds so detached from human experience that I am tempted to ask if you are a human or just a disembodied spirit that haunts the internet.
When the first neanderthal drew a deer on the walls of a cave, where did they get inspiration?
When a little child draws a tree for the first time, where do they draw inspiration? Do you think they were reviewing works of Picasso?
When the firm man made an axe, chopped a tree, made a bed, sown some clothes, discovered fire, where did they draw inspiration?
Do you not have eyes, ears, do you not perceive and get inspiration from the natural world around you?
Are we going to discount the hundreds to thousands of artistic pictures children are exposed to? Or how about the teacher sitting up front demonstrating to the class how to draw a tree?
> Do you not have eyes, ears, do you not perceive and get inspiration from the natural world around you?
Learning to see as an artist is a distinct skill. Being able to take the super compressed simplified world view that mind sees and put something recognizable on paper is a specialized skill that has to be developed. That skill is developed by doing it over and over again, often by copying the style of an artist that someone enjoys.
Or to put it another way, go to any period in history prior to the mid 20th century and art in a given region starts to share the same style, dramatically so, because people were inspired by each other, almost to a comical extent. (Financial reasons also had something to do with it as well of course, Artists paint/carve/engrave/etc what sells!)
Is the result a copy, or perhaps a derivative work of the art in the training set?
Does the person using the model have authorship of the result?
Was it even okay to use the art to train the model and then share the resulting weights?
Are the resultant weights protected by copyright themselves?
I suspect the actual answers we'll come to on these topics will be full of nuance.
We do know one thing for sure - that for AI it’s 0%
Once upon a time it was a contentious idea that humans had significant authorship in photographs, which merely mechanically captured the world. What % is the camera's independent inspiration?
Here, we have humans guiding what's often a quite involved process of synthesis of past human (and machine) creation.
The person using the AI doesn't matter in the equation. They aren't an artist, they're a monkey with a typewriter.
We're talking about the AI here, because it can generate the same images no matter which monkey with a typewriter is typing the prompts.
That's an opinion.
Does your opinion hold in all circumstances? If I spend 20 hours with an AI, iterating prompts, erasing portions of output and asking it to repaint and blend, and combining scenes-- did I do anything creative?
No matter how great the AI is, a monkey with an AI will never generate anything useful.
Do you think art was there before humans? Or humans made art?
If you believe the 1st proposition… please tell me about your very unique religion!
If not… you've answered your own question.
Do you feel the same way about tools like Google Translate?
Translate operates at a large-chunk resolution, and one of the insights in solving the problem was the idea that you can often get a pretty-good-enough translation by swapping a whole sentence for another whole sentence. So they ingest vast amounts of pre-translated content (the UN publications are a great source, because they have to be published in the language of every member nation), align it for sentence- and paragraph-match, and feed the translation engine at that level.
It's created an uncanny amount of accuracy in the result, and it's basically fed wholesale by the diligent work of translators who were not asked their consent to feed that beast. Almost nobody bats an eye about this because the value (letting people using different languages communicate with each other) grossly outstrips the opportunity cost of lost human translator work, and even the translators are, in general, in favor of it; they aren't going to be displaced because (a) it doesn't really work in realtime (yet), (b) it can't handle any of the deeper signal (body language, tone, nuance) of face-to-face negotiation, and (c) languages are living things that constantly evolve, and human translators handle novel constructs way better than the machines do (so in high-touch political environments, they matter; the machines have replaced translators in roles like "rewriting instruction manuals" that were always pretty under-served in the first place).
If you can do the correction when reading, it seems reasonable to assume the reader in the opposite direction has the same correction capability.
I would expect the chance of confusion to be identical. The only difference is a matter of perspective, where in one case you are the reader and in one case you are the author.
It's better for me to receive a text in the original language and translate it myself than to try to decipher something translated automatically.
That’s is not the case for art, vast majority of art used by midjourney is not public domain.
Is that true? How did you establish that?
>what about if we eventually robot labourers that is trained on observing human labourers?
Interesting point, but by that point in time I don't think generative art will even be in the top 10 ethical dilemmas to solve for "sentient" robots.
As it is now, robots aren't the ones at the helm grabbing data for themselves. Humans give orders (scripts) and provide data and what/where to obtain that data.
This is an interesting example because even in the $100 case you are still talking about machine-augmentation. You can have a seamstress or a tailor customize patterns, using off the shelf textiles, for that order of magnitude price - but if you want to use custom built, exotic materials or many kinds combined, the cost is on the orders of thousands not hundreds. Also there is a large industry of just printing designs on stock-shirts, that has a different point effort-scale equilibria.
Thinking about how how automation disintermediates is very important. For animation, often productions have key-frame artists in the animation pipeline that define scenes, and then others that take though to flush out all the details of that scene. GenAI can potentially automate that process. You could still have the artist producing a keyframe, and can render that into a video.
Another big factor is style. One hypothesized reason that more impressionism, absurdism or abstract art all become styles is photography. Once cheap machine-produced photography became available, there is less need for a portrait artist. But further, it also is no longer high-status and others push trends alternative directions.
All the experiments and innovation going right now will definitely settle into a different set of roles for artists, and trends that they will seek to satisfy. Art-style itself will change as a result of both what is technically possible and also what is _not_ easily automatable in order to gain prestige.
What's killing art is this idea by a vocal minority of "artists" that they need to mass produce their work, enter the market, and attempt to make millions of dollars by selling and distributing it to millions.
That's not art. That's capitalism. That's competing to produce something that customers will want to buy more than what your competitors offer.
If you want to compete on the capitalistic marketplace, then compete on the capitalistic marketplace. But if you want to be an artist, be an artist.
Art is still alive and well and always will be. Every day I see people singing because they love singing, making pottery because they love making pottery, writing because they love writing. Whether other people love or enjoy their art, the artist may or may not care. Whether they can profit from their art, the artist may or may not care. But many billions of artists will keep creating, crafting, and designing day after day, and they will never be stopped by AI or anything else.
Do you know what a job does? What a company does? It contributes to society! It produces something that someone else values. That they value so much they're willing to pay for it. Being part of this isn't a bad thing. It's what makes society work.
A job/company entertains. It keeps things clean. It transports people to where they need to go. It produces. It gives people things they want. It creates tools, and paints, and nails, and shirts. I look out my window, and I see people delivering furniture, chefs cooking food and selling it out of trucks, keepers maintaining grounds, people walking dogs.
Being useful to the fellow members of your society for 40 hours a week is not "soul crushing."
Too mid to understand your point.
Find the intersection of something that people increasingly value, that you enjoy, and that you can compete at.
The best proof that people value something is that they're spending money for it. If people aren't spending money, they don't value it, and you probably don't want to go into it. If people aren't spending more and more money on it every year, then it's not increasing in value, and you probably don't want to go into it.
The best proof that you enjoy something is that you enjoyed it in the past. Things you liked as a kid, activities that excited you as a young adult, etc., are often the best candidates.
Look for intersections of the two things above. Do some Googling, do some research.
Finally, you need to be able to compete at it. If you do something worse than everyone else does it, then no one will pick you, because you're probably not being helpful. The simple answer to this is to practice to make yourself better. But most people don't want to do that. A better answer to this is to be more unique, so you can avoid the competition. Don't do a job that has a title, a college major, and millions of talented applicants. It's not that helpful to society to do something a hundred million other people can already do, which is why there's more competition and lower wages.
When you find the intersection of what's valued and what you enjoy, call up some people in those fields and ask what's rare. What in their area is needed. What are they missing. What is no one else doing.
Or just start your own company. That's the easiest way to be unique. But it's hard.
Finally, if you feel you're too "mid," then make sure your standards aren't crazy. Don't let society tell you that you need to be a millionaire with a yacht and designer clothes to be happy. Get a normal 9 to 5 with some purpose in it, that you can be proud of, that others appreciate. Live within your means and don't stress yourself out financially. Spend your free time doing things you like. Take care of your health, find good relationships, and treasure them. That's a happy life at any income. I know a bunch of miserable depressed rich people who are very good at making money and very bad at health/relationships/etc., which is the real stuff that life is made out of.
I hate making analogies, but if we make humans plant rows of potatoes, should that command a higher price and seen more valuable than planting potatoes by tractor 20 rows wide?
No, we should absolutely be giving bias to humanity. Flesh and blood humans matter, their lives matter, their thoughts matter and their work matters.
Machines are tools for them to use not entities given the same rights and same consideration.
I reject your whole premise.
Well ok, that was 300 years ago and views have changed dramatically since then.
People have the choice to continue making stories and they'll have a fanbase for it and always will, because that's ultimately apart of freedom and choice. Many are less what I'll call purists here, and don't care about how it came to be, they just want a quality story.
What you're loosely proposing is art being a protected class of output, when we have tools that can match and soon with the potential to surpass. Is that not a terrific way to stunt what you're trying to defend?
For transparency, I am an advocate for human made art, but I am against stunting tooling that can otherwise match said creativity. I see that as an artform in itself.
I think AI art will by definition never surpass human art. Humans can be inspired by things other than the art of others.
If you believe AI tooling is an artform then you categorically are advocating against human made art as far as I am concerned.
You are free to think so, but it really doesn't make you an artist any more than wearing a medal you bought second hand makes you a war hero.
Something else did the work and you're just claiming credit. It's honestly kind of sad.
prompting a search engine to stitch images together on your behalf might result in an image you can call art, but imo all the art generated wholecloth like this sucks. necessarily derivative. put into the world without thought.
My favorite critique of LLM work: "why would I bother to read a story that no one bothered to write"
It’s very easy to make bad art quickly with powerful tools. It’s also possible to carefully craft prompts which generate amazing results that win awards. Source: I’ve done this. You should see the reactions when people have heaped flowery accords on a drawing and then find out it’s Dall-e. The irony of the transition from “art is rebellion” to pearl-clutching is almost the best part.
That critique says more about your understanding than it does about the work.
Is it realy about volume?
How how many books per second can you read to influence and change your personal style?
I don't think any person who actually has worked on anything creative in their life would compare a personal style to a model that can output in nearly any style at extreme speeds. And even if you're inspired by a specific author, invariably what happens is it becomes mix of yourself + those influences, not a damn near-copy.
With visual mediums it's even worse, because you have to take the time [months, years] to specialize in that specific medium/style.
I don't think anyone who has ever read a novel in their life would say that an AI can write literature at all, in any style.
> not a damn near-copy.
The obvious solution is to just treat it as if a human did it. If you did not know the authorship of the output and thought it was a human, would you still consider it copyright infringement? If yes, fair enough. If no, then i think is clearly not a "damn near-copy"
On my laptop, using modern tools backed by AI? ... many.
>> How how many books per second can you read to influence and change your personal style?
Thanks now to AI, hundreds. I can plug the output of the book-reading AI into the input of the tool I use to write my books and thereby update my personal style to incorporate all the latest trends. Blame the idiots who are paying me for my books.
You completely ignored the premise of the question.
First, the law is pretty clear that yes if your story is too similar to another work, they have rights. Second, it's not at all obvious we can or should generalize from "what a human can do" and "what a bunch of computers can do" in areas like this.
But they did. The presence of a secondary market for used books increased the value of some new books. People buy them knowing that they might one day recoup some costs by selling them. Would people pay more, or less, for a new car if they were told they could never sell or trade it away as a used car?
Baffling
Please back up this statement.
I for one, buy primary market books for the content; and to support creators whom I wish to support. Not to display the book or resell it. That is some capitalist jive.
People typically use libraries because
A) they are too poor to afford the books, and libraries therein provide a valuable community function
B) they are doing research and only need the books for a short time
C) they read more books than they can afford
and other such reasons.
Arguably the U.S. courts are in the wrong here. We can only hope first sale doctrine is extended to digital goods in the U.S. in the future, as it has been in the EU for over a decade.
[0] https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewconten...
The question is about someone/something writing a book _influenced_ by Harry Potter -- do they owe JK Rowling royalties?
It could be argued quite convincingly that stories like Brooks's Shannara and Eddings's Belgariad are LOTR with the serial numbers filed off — but there is more than enough difference in how various pieces work for those series to make them unique creations that do not infringe on the properties or cover too much the story. (Although I cringe at putting the execrable Belgariad books in any class with either LOTR or Shannara.)
The "best" modern example of this is the 50 Shades series. These are Twilight fan fiction (it is acknowledged as such) with the vampire bits filed off. They are inspired by Twilight, but they are not identifiably Twilight in the end. It might be hard to tell the quality of writing from that which an LLM can produce, and frankly Anne Rice did it all better decades before (both vampires and BSDM).
Humans can be influenced by writers, artists, etc. LLMs cannot. They can produce statistically approximated mishmashes of the original works themselves, but there is no act or spark of creation, insight, or influence going on that makes the sort of question you’re asking silly. LLMs are just math. Humans may be just chemistry, but there’s qualia that LLMs do not have any more than `fortune` does.
I'm with all your other arguments ... but not this point. What is the special magic property that machine-generated art doesn't have? Both human and machine generated art can be banal, can be crap. And I think there is plenty of machine generated art this a quite beautiful, and if well prompted even very insightful. Non-GenAI can be this way, Conway's game of life has a quality of beauty to it that rivals of forms of modern art. If you wanted to argue that there still is the need for a human to provide some initial inspiration as input, or programming before something of value can be generated, then I would agree, at least for now, though there is meta-argument about asking LLMs to generate their own prompts that makes this an increasingly gray area.
But I don't think the stochastic parrot argument holds water. Most of _human_ creations is derivative. Unique mixes of pre-existing approaches, techniques, substance, often _is_ the creative act. True innovation with no tie to existing materials seems vanishingly rare to me and is really high bar, beyond which most humans ever achieve.
This is literally wrong, LLMs are influenced by their users. And people can input new ideas, facts and explore new directions by choosing how they interact with the LLM.
A LLM writing a book all on its own start to finish would be a different story, the output would be derived 100% from its training set. A LLM being prompted with a book chapter would risk borrowing too much.
But if you prompt a LLM without copy pasting protected content in the prompt, then you are the main influence. And LLMs can explore outside their training distribution in this way, helped by humans.
Many people think a trained LLM is frozen, but they do in-context-learning, they can even acquire new concepts/words and properly use them in the same session. They don't keep the memory of this until retraining, but that doesn't mean they are locked up. There is plenty of space in the buffer you can use to add new material after training.
This kind of thinking is like saying you can't drive a nail unless you own a licensed hammer, if someone is using his shoe to drive a nail will be in infringement. Maybe the shoe is also a hammer if the user so says.
Have you noticed that authors and artists love sharing their inspirations? Let's say you're an up-and-coming author. In an interview, you list your sources of inspiration.
Using your logic, why does the creative community celebrate you and your inspirations instead of crying foul like they are with LLMs?
But it's also going to be affected by the teachers you had in pre-school, the people you hang around with, your relatives, films you've seen, adverts you watched, good memories and bad memories of events. You bring your lived experience to your story, and not just a mish-mash of stories in a particular genre, but everything.
Whereas when you train a model, you know the exact input, and that exact input may be 100% copyright material.
How closely is this the case? What blind spots exist? How do you measure this? What is the capacity for original idea generation does the human mind have and how does it inspire a unique spin to it?
This is one of those areas where 'thought experiments' are never going to pass muster against genuine experiments with metrics, trial, and robist scientific research.
But with the stakes as they are, I dont have faith there exists a good faith dialogue in this arena.
However, AI models require copying and reproducing copyrighted works, whereas when I read I book I’m not copying it and I’ve secured some sort of license to use it.
The collection, mass copying, and redistribution of work to create these models seems quite obviously to be a violation on IP laws.
If openai would pay usage fees for the training material per user its generating content for - it would never be profitable - artist would be fine off. But even all the shares are owned by people who have given this system none of it‘s knowledge.
In that case, good? I thought if nothing else, these past year or two would teach companies about sinking money into unsustainable businesses and then price gauging later (i know it won't, the moment interest rates fall we are back to square one). If it isn't profitable, scale down the means of production (which may include paying C class executives one less yatch per year, tragic), charge more upfront to the customers, or work out better deals with your 3rd parties (which is artists in this case).
I also find some scheudenfredre in that these companies are trying to sell "less enployees" to other companies but would also benefit from said scaling down as they throw out defenses of "we can't afford to pay every copyright" .